News — TSR

Today I'm very pleased to take on the art of Dragon Magazine #121!  Why, you might ask?  Well, because it has a fantastic Jim Holloway cover, his 6th to that point for Dragon, and it features samurai! This particular issue was released in May 1987, art directed by Roger Raupp, and edited by Roger E. Moore. The cover, as mentioned above, was done by artist Jim Holloway who in 1987 was really hitting the sweet spot of his art career.  His work to that point seemed to lead him to a certain mastery of craft that could not only be...

If you are an old school gamer, then you probably have a vague memory of the first D&D product you ever saw. For me, those visions of the past cycle around three distinct images, none of which I’m exactly sure were really ‘the first’. One, of course, is Elmore’s cover of the Red Box, viewed in the Sears Christmas Catalogue. Two, would be Jim Holloway’s cover for Dragon Magazine #88 owned by a fellow student in my 7th Grade art class who sat across from me. Third, would have been Jim Roslof’s cover for A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade...

The 1992 release of TSR’s Dark*Sun Dragon King’s hardcover for 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons [boy is that a mouthful!] hit right in the prime of my college years. I never collected Dark*Sun back then, but I played it with my roommate Rob in a single campaign that was a good deal of fun [because I was always the DM and got to get out from behind the screens for a while].Thus, I didn’t own this supplement when it came out and had to acquire it when I set about looking for Dark*Sun on eBay in probably 2005. It was...

There are certain issues of Dragon Magazine that resonate with me, and then there are others that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. The latter had been the case for Issue #95 from March 1985 until I took it down from my collection to have a look for today’s AotG review.Now I probably had never read this issue because the cover doesn’t speak to me. It was always a rather odd and far too realistic cover concerning a 1970s thrift shop feel. Still, upon taking the time to really study Dean Morrissey’s work, entitled ‘Toad’s Cloak Armorsmith Shop’, I began to...

Today I’m going to take a look at the TSR module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. I once had an opportunity to meet writer Lenard Lakofka for breakfast and discussed a bit of his Lendore Isles series [those being all his L modules] which was pretty entertaining over coffee.He confided in me that TSR had paid him and astounding $11,000 for the The Secret of Bone Hill, a module that didn’t go over well with the editors and was a struggle to even put out. Still, whatever the problems in production, I think it just showed how INSANE TSR...